20061209

's No Way to Die

by Madam Z

Stanley and I had been fighting all day and it felt like we'd been fighting all year and all eternity, and it was January and snow lay thick and cold as far as the eye could see and even farther, and I was so miserable I wanted to die. I recalled reading about Eskimos being sent out on an ice floe to die, and it seemed to me it would be a relatively peaceful, easy death; you just fall asleep and never wake up. So I told Stanley I was going for a walk in the woods and went outside with no jacket, no hat, no gloves, and set off looking for my final resting place. I found a perfect, coffin-sized mound of snow between the woods and the barn and lay down on it, wriggling around to settle myself into the snow, so my body would freeze quicker. I lay on my back, with my arms folded across my chest and my eyes closed, waiting for the big sleep to take me away. Unfortunately, the snow that was in contact with my still-warm body started to melt, making me both cold and wet; I didn't feel at all sleepy, even though my eyes were shut and I really wanted to die, so finally I just said "oh shit" and got up and went back into our warm, cozy house.

6S

Madam Z, author of Good, Bad, Batter, lives, loves, and writes unpublished stories in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, though her heart is still in her native California, which makes it extremely difficult to do much aerobic exercise.